


This Fated Obscuring

by Zagzagael



Category: The Originals (TV), Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-17
Updated: 2013-09-17
Packaged: 2017-12-26 21:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/970447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a gift exchange at livejournal's tvd_originals community. </p><p>Prompt - Rebekah watches as Klaus and Elijah become rivals for Tatia and Katerina.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Fated Obscuring

Rebekah keeps a memory vault inside her heart. Only she has the key. And she only reaches into this secret place when she absolutely needs to, at her lowest, most frightened, despairing, confused, and betrayed. The memories she treasures above all things are there and she has a constant fear, a realization, that they are fragile, the finest threads of recollections that tie her to her existence, and that each one could be destroyed, mangled, diminished. She thinks that will be the end for her, she could bear no more, could not withstand having everything stripped away if she lost these testimonials to time past. She knows that it is a strange dependency, this need to close her eyes and touch the gossamer scene, sip the emotion, relive what was once real. But these are the moments that define her, and in her darkest hours she wonders if that is what life is, this collecting and hoarding and cherishing of bits and pieces of existence, the proving of one life entwined with the lives of others.

She knows that these are the small significance's humans re-experience while dying. She knows this because the memory vault is the place she has been locked into when daggered.

~***~

 _She is being held, safe and warm, against his body._ Her earliest memory is of Elijah holding her, rocking her to sleep, and rocking her awake, smiling down at her. Now she realizes he would have been a child himself, at least by the standards of these modern times they are currently living in. But try as she might, she cannot envision Elijah as anything other than her older brother. She knows this is narcissistic, knows it has psychologically limited the relationship she has with him, but she needs him to be protector and guardian.

She wonders if he remembers cradling the child she once was. She wonders if he still knows by heart the lullabies he sang to her in their mother’s native tongue.

~***~

 _She is on his back, his hands locked tight under her knees, her arms around his neck._ Her remembrances of Niklaus begin with running. He is the strongest of all her brothers, stronger even than her father. They had spent countless hours galloping through the woods, lying on their backs upon the mossy carpet of the forest floor, their home away from hearth. The small span of their human years together, each moment spinning out into aeons, had locked them out of time and into states of being. Together. Adventures and discoveries defined the long hours of daylight but never the night. At night they stay locked inside, the sounds outside terrible and frightening. Henrik’s death could have been her death.

Now she knows she was rent apart but not by strangers.

~***~

 _She is being sworn to secrecy, tell no one, tell no one. Abandoned to her own company, the two of them steal away, leaving her robbed of something she didn't even know could be stolen._ She didn’t blame Tatia but she did hate her with furious passion. The brief yearlong affair Elijah and Niklaus conducted with her was Rebekah’s first taste of betrayal, of being pushed aside, of being forgotten. But she had her mother to comfort her, and Kol to care for, and girlish things to fill her empty hours with. Distractions and diversions. She was a naïf. She had no knowledge of the physical carnality that had consumed her brothers, had no understanding of how the girl was pulling them both under her sea.

They were not friends, too different. Tatia small and dark, Rebekah tall and light. She was the child in perpetuity. Tatia was a mother, she had a child on her hip. No known family, no husband. It was as though she had walked out of the woods, risen from a tree-lined pond, climbed down from the raptor’s nest. She appeared and the boys were enchanted.

Rebekah knew about magic, but Tatia was not a witch, she was the spell itself.

~***~

 _She and her mother are kneeling creek-side, washing clothing. She watches as her mother lifts Niklaus’s jerkin to her face, as though breathing through the wool, then the same with Elijah’s tunic. She stands and stares far off into the shadows of the forest. Rebekah watches as worlds darken in her eyes._ Before Tatia. They were all naïve. Protected and kept innocent by a mother frightened of the dark. The night, the shadowed woods, the secrets of the heart, death. Tatia, the doppelganger, brought knowledge to her brothers as though she were Eve proffering the forbidden fruit. And truly, Rebekah wondered often now, who was Esther to forbid this, she who had lain with the enemy, bore the secret seed inside herself for nine long months and then nursed the child of another man at her breast. Had regret been turned on the spindle inside her mother’s heart, spinning into the skeins with which she eventually bound them all? The recrimination sentenced each one of them to century’s long death and dying.

Rebekah rarely brought recollections of her mother out into the light of day. The truth had tarnished the memories, once beloved and treasured, they were ugly with patina. She wasn’t ready to discard them, or at least the ones created before Tatia, but she hid them away in deep pockets of scar tissue.

~***~

 _Giggling and tipping her head, just exactly in the manner of her predecessor, the elegant sweep of her arm, the curled fingers hold the blown glass flute filled with amber decadence._ The year Rebekah finally forgave Elijah and Niklaus was the year of her highest and lowest emotional map. The topography of joy and despair. The year that she entered the ballroom and on the far side stood Katerina. Rebekah had stood as though hardened to stone, the doppelganger playing the part of Medusa in her own mythology. Neither Elijah nor Niklaus noticed the metamorphosis, their laughter acting as chisel and hammer upon her body of rock. The moments of eternity, of realization, of understanding what should have been obvious. She summoned the memory of drinking Tatia’s blood and the spell was broken, her flesh released, she turned and fled the room and outside went to her knees, her arms tight around her body, and had to rock herself to calmness.

That brief span of months became a bloodbath of her own creation. The childish vampire’s cry for attention, both would later accuse her of. Months and months later. But in the heated sickness of the moment, heart-broken, jealous, alone inside the tomb of her skin, she clawed through jugulars, buried her face inside body cavities, rent lovers limb from bloody limb. Built a small queendom with corpses, piled broken bones like mortared walls, snapped femurs to suck out blooded marrow. She was writing a play of death and murder, retribution and revenge, alone on stage, a soliloquy of rage recited to the dead or dying or those who were not yet aware of their dark fate to be met at the point of her starving fang. And still, her brothers were occupied, smitten, taken, far away from her. She tore everything to pieces until Katerina escaped through her own choice of death and dark re-birth (she, herself, never had a choice and wondered what she would have done if offered).

Elijah and Klaus came for her then, wiping tears from their eyes the way she wiped the blood of her victims from off her face.

The three of them melted into the shadows they cast, into new lives, new communities. And the years chewed at what was left of loyalty and kinship, family oaths and promises, gnawing ragged on the ties that had bound them to one another.

Elijah became a living memory. He had slowly, surely, and inexplicably separated from them. At first he would seek them out for a month’s long reunion and then disappear. After long months, she and Niklaus would close their eyes as though blindfolded and go looking for him in the dark, hands outstretched, rejoicing for the while until he melted away once more. And then those months became years which became decades and one morning they both knew he had been gone too long to find again. She lay in bed, wrecked beyond grief, and asked Niklaus to hold her but he only wanted to mix champagne and virgin’s blood, shaking the bottle until she became drenched with his delight once more.

~***~

 _He found her beneath the waterfall. Weeping. Forlorn._ There had been a long weekend with Niklaus, three or four hundred years ago now. One hundred years after Katerina had turned and disappeared into the shadows. So long ago and yet if she wanted, needed, she could pull the memory back into her thoughts where it glistened. Pull it like taffy, folding it over and over itself until it shone and she could lick at it. The sweetness drooling out of her mouth.

Loneliness had begun to outline the edges of her existence, bold and black and constricting. Her space in the world was shrinking and yet she seemed to be standing alone on a grey mottled vista, a vast landscape. Had he known her despair or was he merely bored with the outlandish excess of six hundred years of living? He was so much more exacting than that, devious in intent. Perhaps she had just been the endgame in his recent machinations, maneuvered into place, slid forward on her emotions, her longings.

She had tried, over the course of those few days, that handful of hours, to make him see her, feel her, know her in the way that he saw and felt and knew the doppelganger. But it was of no use, no avail, and ultimately dissolved to nothingness on her tongue. They never spoke of it and she wondered if he even remembered it at all. In the course of one thousand years, a weekend’s time was nothing, a blinking of the eye, a clearing of the throat, a flicking of the spider from the bedclothes. She mostly kept this rememoration in the furthest corner of her memory vault, strapped down as though it were a living mad thing straightjacketed and reciting murderous odes to forbidden love.

Even without physical consummation, Klaus would always be her one true great love. The biting whip upon her flesh, the answer to all the questions, the hidden gold within the mine. Part of her rejoiced, validated, when the truth of his parentage was revealed. He looked similar to her but the blood in his veins was nothing like her blood.

~***~

She had kept track, of course. Hard to find a centuries-long day calendar at the stationers, but in her mind, she marked off the years, giant red X’s over decades. Dreading, waiting, knowing.

It started off strong, that era. She and Stefan and Niklaus. Invincible and so full of stolen life. Experiences and adventures. It hearkened back to being carried piggyback through the woods of her human childhood. She let the male vampires carry her where they would, pouring alcohol and blood down her throat. Dancing the sun awake. Sleeping tangled and fulfilled. She fell madly, deeply, and, ultimately, hopelessly in love. When Klaus daggered her she closed her eyes and pulled the past that no longer existed around her, a piecemeal quilt, and slept content, dreaming beneath the warmth of memory.

When she was woken, the twisted apple tree had dropped another poisoned fruit. And whose teeth had broken the red skin this time? Whose throat was constricting around that small, white bite?

The snake-headed Medusa had reared again. Turning those who gazed upon her to stone, breaking anyone who dared to love her into jagged shards.

The bold moon cast itself in front of her brilliant sun. Occulting. Shadow to her light. Eclipsing her.

Still.


End file.
